Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998)

What a waste of my time!!!

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This movie has a really nice pace of editing among the many beautiful images presented by Joan Chen. You should take note that the pace isn't very fast and the story presents it self very linear. Without making clichés. For me it wasn't disturbing, I even embraced it.I watched this movie because the band Xiu Xiu recommended it. And I knew that this wasn't going to be happy-happy-joy-joy-experience.But the movie really grabbed me after wards, knowing that this isn't likely for many movies I regard this movie as a masterpiece. Strong Cinematography, good acting, moving story, nice soundtrack (not only the music), fine pace of editing.Be good to your self and step in to this experience.

It is even different for me, a Chinese youngster, just to comment on this sort of works, let alone introducing this movie to the worldwide spectators. Actually this is hard to be understood by foreigners, who will definitely consider this movie as a tragedy. It is a tragedy, and it is much more than a tragedy. In fact, it is the most heartquaking works of this theme I have ever received. This sort or this theme I have referred to is the particular times that happened in China decades ago, not far from us. Actually it is the times my parents have experienced. That period of ten years was filled with tragedies. The story this movie has described is just a corner of iceberg. What the times have given me is totally from our fathers' words or the works like this movie, which may not be so effective. However, what the times have given China is profound. Thanks to the times, China has been in the right direction for a long time. This direction has led and will go on leading the nation to unlimited prosperity.

I've read several reviews here and, to me, all of them are missing the point of the film. Even though the main character trades sex for freedom, this takes place within the context of a society where individual desire and freedom simply don't exist. The girl, in the communist sense, has corrupted herself, not by trading her body for favor, but by wanting to. She places her own desires above those of the People and is endlessly punished for it. The film is a meditation on communist values, and how they have misled and betrayed its people. Everyone that the girl meets, except for her emasculated mentor, takes from her until, at the end, she simply has nothing left to give. The film works in the context of a larger metaphor, I believe, one that deals with Tibet and its relationship to China. One can plainly see that China's presence there is harmful, that its values spread corruption even to the furthest reaches. The relationship between the herder and the girl can be seen as a metaphor for the relationship between China and Tibet. The herder's death is not merely a reaction to the loss of a loved one. It is a metaphor for the death of the soul of Tibet. The Chinese government understood this all too well to be a harsh rhetorical criticism against its policies against women, Tibet, and people in general. That is why it was banned there.

Spoilers herein.Joan Chen is a lovely woman who went to the Chinese outback to learn how ordinary people think visually. So she makes a film about a lovely girl sent to the Chinese outback to learn how ordinary people think agriculturally.The girl ends up feeling she has to prostitute herself to find her way back home. And so with Ms Chen, and as with the girl, we the viewer get some superficial pleasure.This is a simple film, and one can see that it was made by someone with an actor's sensibility. The story is extremely economical, so much so that the camera is anchored to the actors. Every shot is an actor's shot: either to place the actor in a scene or to show the actor acting. The one exception is a rather heavihanded cloud metaphor. This works because the project has such low ambition, but it has the effect of abstracting the story so much we just don't care.A more experienced filmmaker might work at defining the situation, setting up some complex dynamics in the world and then placing some characters within those dynamics. That way we watch them in a context that we understand. Bertolucci did that with `The Last Emperor' in which Ms Chen worked as one of those actors responding to their environment. Here, she has it the other way around. We still get the wilderness, the political idealism and associated petty tyrants. But they are the the other way around, what our heroine sees. We, through our surrogate the camera eye, never see the bigger picture.In a sense, this is a `Taxi Driver' bet, a first film where we get things through one character's mind. It worked for Scorsese because he was fearless in putting us on the edge. This project was clearly designed that way, like `taxi' with the edge being in the sexual exploitation of a young girl. But Ms Chen backs away when the chips are down. Some more visual pain, more explicit images, more of a linkage of loneliness to the environment (for example in the Bertolucci `Sheltering Sky').So what we end up with is a small film where everything seems competent but nothing works quite right. She followed this up with the very similarly conceived `Autumn in NY.' Prostitution in the name of getting home. Sad.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.